History of Middleton-in-Teesdale

Long before Middleton had a name

Middleton’s written story begins in the Middle Ages, but people had been using the landscape around it for thousands of years before anyone wrote the village name down. We cannot say there was a prehistoric village sitting exactly beneath modern Middleton, because the evidence does not show that. What we do have are plenty of signs of people living, farming, burying their dead and moving through the countryside all around it.

Some of the nearest traces are around Stotley, just north-east of Middleton, where Bronze Age burnt mounds survive beside old springs and streams. These strange heaps of fire-cracked stone were left behind by people repeatedly heating stones and using them to warm water thousands of years ago. Across the Tees, around Holwick and Wynch Bridge, the remains become even easier to picture, with old round houses, enclosures and field boundaries showing that farming communities were living on these slopes long before the village we know today had developed.

Then there is Kirkcarrion, the little pine-covered hill that is so easy to recognise from around Middleton. The trees are relatively modern, but the mound beneath them is a Bronze Age burial cairn. When it was opened in the past, a stone burial and an urn containing cremated remains were found. There are later stories giving the person buried there a name and identity, but archaeology cannot tell us who they were, so we think it is better to leave the legend as a legend.

People continued making a living from these hills as the centuries passed. North of Middleton, beside Marl Beck, the remains of a medieval farmstead still survive, including the traces of buildings, a small enclosed yard, old field banks and part of a track. We have spent a lot of time looking at the later mining landscape around Marlbeck, but this is a good reminder that people were farming that ground centuries before miners began driving levels into the hillsides.

Middleton itself starts to come properly into view during the medieval period. The name is Anglo-Saxon in origin and means roughly the middle settlement, middle homestead or middle village, suggesting that the place was already established before the first surviving document happened to mention it. That first known written reference comes in 1161, followed by another in 1198 using the name Middleton super Teisam, Middleton upon the Tees. A church was standing here by around the middle of the twelfth century, putting the church site among the oldest parts of Middleton that we can still identify today.

The dale around that early settlement looked very different from the one we know now. Large areas of Upper Teesdale formed part of a medieval forest landscape used for hunting deer, while land east of Middleton was associated with Rievaulx Abbey, including land connected with horse breeding. Farming remained at the heart of life for centuries, but the countryside gradually became more divided and organised. From the early modern period onwards, common land and older farming arrangements gave way increasingly to enclosed fields and smaller tenanted farms, helping create the patchwork of walls, fields and farmsteads that still surrounds Middleton.

Raby and the white buildings of Upper Teesdale

Another name has been tied to Middleton and the land around it for centuries: Raby. The Manor of Middleton-in-Teesdale had historically been held with the lordship of Barnard Castle. After the estates of the Neville family were forfeited to the Crown following the failed Rising of the North in 1569, Raby Castle was eventually bought by Sir Henry Vane the Elder in 1626. Middleton followed the wider Barnard Castle estate story, and by the eighteenth century the Vane family, later Earls of Darlington and Dukes of Cleveland, were firmly established as lords of the manor. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Raby estate expanded further across Teesdale as land was bought, exchanged and reorganised through enclosure. 

That old landownership is still surprisingly easy to spot today. Raby's Upper Teesdale Estate now stretches west from Middleton towards the Cumbrian boundary and includes dozens of tenanted farms and more than 185 residential properties. Many of them are immediately recognisable by their whitewashed walls. Drive west from Middleton through Newbiggin and further up the dale and those bright white farms and cottages keep appearing against the fields and moorland. It has become such a characteristic part of Upper Teesdale that the North Pennines itself identifies the white Raby farm buildings as one of the distinctive features of the landscape. 

There is an old Teesdale story explaining the colour. A Duke of Cleveland is supposed to have been caught out in a storm and refused shelter at a farmhouse he mistakenly thought belonged to his estate. According to the tale, he then ordered the estate buildings to be whitewashed so they could always be recognised. It is a good story and has been repeated for generations, but we have not found an original estate record proving that this is how the tradition began. What is certain is that whitewashing became closely associated with Raby and the tradition continues today, with estate restoration work still retaining the familiar white finish.

Lead begins to change Middleton

Lead mining around Middleton goes back a long way, although exactly how far is difficult to pin down. Roman mining is often mentioned when people talk about the North Pennines, but there is not enough evidence to say that Romans were definitely digging for lead at Middleton or Coldberry. The story here does not really need stretching that far anyway, because by the seventeenth century the paper trail becomes much clearer.

In 1666 a dispute began over the tithes being collected from local lead mines, and records from 1680 and 1681 actually name workings around Middleton, including Eggleshope Grove, Red Grooves and Coldberry. Other surviving papers connected with Middleton lead-ore tithes reach back into the sixteenth century. They do not give us a neat date for when the first miner picked up a tool here, but they do show something important: lead was already worth arguing over, leasing and making money from long before the great mining landscape of the nineteenth century appeared.

A school before the Lead Company

Middleton was not simply waiting for a mining company to arrive and create a community. One lovely reminder of that comes from 1729, when four sisters helped establish a free school in the village.

Mary, Elizabeth, Margaret and Grace Robinson were the co-heirs of William Robinson, and in March 1729 property was settled to provide an income for the school. Mary and Elizabeth were married, so their husbands Christopher Stephenson and Robert Hoggart also appear in the legal documents.

The school stood in Chapel Row and was intended to educate 16 poor children between the ages of six and twelve. The arrangements were surprisingly detailed. The rectors of Middleton-in-Teesdale, Stanhope and Wolsingham were given responsibility for appointing the schoolmaster and overseeing the school, and a copy of the original 1729 settlement and its rules still survives among Middleton's parish records.

There is even a tiny glimpse of the people behind those old records. At a church visitation in 1778, Middleton's parish clerk was also described as a schoolmaster, and somebody had a complaint about him. It was not his teaching they were unhappy with — it was his singing ability. We cannot say for certain that he taught at the 1729 charity school, but it is a lovely little reminder that behind all these old deeds and dates were ordinary people living, teaching, complaining and getting on with village life.

So when the London Lead Company later opened its own school in Middleton, education was not something completely new to the village. Some of Middleton's poorer children had already been receiving free schooling for around ninety years.

The change brought by the London Lead Company was on a completely different scale. It took its first Teesdale mining lease in 1753 and gradually spread its interests across the dale. By 1815 Middleton had become the headquarters of its Teesdale operations.

That decision changed the village enormously. Middleton was still a farming and market community, but it was now also the place from which a major mining business organised workings spread across the surrounding hills. Money, ore, supplies and people all passed through the village, while houses, schools, offices and workshops followed. Much of the Middleton we still recognise today began to take shape during the century that followed.

Crossing the Tees

For centuries the River Tees was more than a pretty edge to Middleton. It was a real obstacle. One old account still describes the crossing near the village as a dangerous ford at Step Ends, which gives some idea of what travelling south from Middleton could mean before there was a proper road bridge.

That began to change in 1810, when plans were drawn up for a new carriage road and bridge between Middleton and Lonton. Durham’s archives still hold the survey, the landowners’ resolution supporting the scheme and an appeal asking people to subscribe towards the cost. The first bridge appears to have been attempted in 1811, but collapsed when it was nearly finished and had to be rebuilt. The stone bridge standing today is dated by Historic England to around 1814.

It could hardly have arrived at a more important moment. The London Lead Company made Middleton the headquarters of its Teesdale operations the following year, and in 1817 Parliament authorised a turnpike road running from Brough-under-Stainmore to Middleton Bridge. The crossing helped connect a rapidly growing Middleton with the roads running south and west, long before the railway finally reached the dale.

There is another little detail that makes the bridge particularly Middleton. Until the county boundaries changed in 1974, the Tees here separated County Durham from the North Riding of Yorkshire. Walking across the bridge meant leaving one historic county and entering another, and it is still widely known locally as County Bridge. The same boundary would later give Middleton’s railway story its odd twist: the village was in Durham, but its railway station was built across the river in Yorkshire.

The bridge itself is now Grade II* listed. Its huge single stone arch has carried generations of miners, farmers, carts, livestock, visitors and everyday traffic across the Tees, while the road above has changed from the nineteenth-century turnpike into today’s B6277.

The London Lead Company reshapes the village

Once Middleton became the company’s Teesdale base, the change was physical as well as economic. Durham archive records show the London Lead Company acquiring property and land around Middleton during the early nineteenth century, including transactions between 1816 and 1826. The clearest surviving symbol of that investment is Middleton House, built in 1823 by the Durham architect Ignatius Bonomi. Historic England records it as both the agent’s house and the company office, and describes it as the principal London Lead Company building in the area. It is worth stopping to look at it properly because its size makes the scale of Middleton’s importance much easier to understand. This was not an office attached to one local mine. Major decisions affecting workings spread across Teesdale were being handled from here. 

Housing followed the growth of the company. The Newtown area was developed to provide homes for people connected with the mines, and one of its most recognisable features survives at Masterman Place. The stone entrance arch is dated 1823, was designed by Bonomi for the London Lead Company and led into a planned development intended to provide company housing. Different types of accommodation reflected different positions within the workforce, while rows of smaller cottages developed nearby. The long gardens behind some of the houses were useful rather than decorative, giving families space to grow food and keep animals. When you move from the older centre of Middleton towards Newtown, you are effectively walking into the part of the village created during this period of industrial growth. 

The company’s presence went well beyond offices and houses. A school was established in 1818, with the original plans allowing for around 200 children. A later parliamentary inquiry gives us a particularly useful glimpse into what education meant here. Children were taught reading, writing and arithmetic, but also subjects including geography and natural history, while girls were taught sewing and knitting. The same 1842 evidence records company-paid medical attendance and medicine for miners and their families, alongside average weekly earnings described at around 12 to 15 shillings. The London Lead Company had strong Quaker roots and its approach to housing, schooling and welfare was unusual for its time, but none of that should make us romanticise mining itself. The work remained physically hard and dangerous, both underground and on the dressing floors.

More facilities appeared as the community grew. A reading room was built at Masterman Place in 1854, and other company buildings around Hude included workshops, stables, a clock tower and weighbridge. There was also an early cooperative tradition. Surviving records begin on 19 December 1845 with the Teesdale Workmen’s Corn Association, followed by the Lead Company’s Teesdale Workmen’s Corn Society. These were practical organisations, helping working families obtain essential goods at a time when the cost of food could make an enormous difference to a household. The surviving minute books continue the story through the nineteenth century and show that the familiar idea of the village Co-op has much deeper roots here than its modern shopfront suggests.

A family of Middleton doctors

Not every important Middleton story came from the mines. For more than half a century, one family became closely tied to medicine in the village, and one of their descendants eventually made a name for himself far beyond Teesdale.

The Oliver family’s story in Middleton begins in 1783, when William Oliver arrived in the village as a surgeon and apothecary after studying medicine in Edinburgh. His work took him out across Upper Teesdale to visit patients, but he was looking at much more than illnesses as he travelled. Oliver had a serious interest in botany and began collecting some of the unusual plants growing around the upper dale. He worked alongside John Binks, a Middleton lead miner who collected medicinal plants and became a botanist in his own right. Between them, and later with the Rev John Harriman, they helped bring some of Upper Teesdale’s remarkable flora to the attention of the wider botanical world. Oliver remained in Middleton until his death in 1816, and his headstone in the churchyard records him simply as “William Oliver, Surgeon in Middleton".

Medicine carried on through the family. William’s sons followed him into the profession, with George and William Oliver both appearing as surgeons in Middleton during the early nineteenth century. William remained a doctor in the village until his death in 1851, while a later Middleton reminiscence remembered his brother George setting a local boy’s broken leg without charge shortly before leaving the village. Durham’s probate records independently confirm William Oliver as a surgeon of Middleton-in-Teesdale and record his death on 17 December 1851. 

The family’s best-known doctor came in the next generation. George Oliver was born in Middleton-in-Teesdale on 13 April 1841, the son of the village surgeon William Oliver. His father died when George was still a boy, and by 1859 the eighteen-year-old was studying under his older brother William Hodgshon Oliver, a surgeon in Stockton. A newspaper that year congratulated young George after he passed his University of London matriculation examination and remarked that his success “argues well for his future progress.” It turned out to be a remarkably good prediction. George went on to study at University College London, build a successful medical career and become a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. 

What makes George particularly interesting is where that career eventually led. He became fascinated by blood pressure and circulation, invented several instruments to help measure what was happening inside the body and worked with the physiologist Edward Schäfer on the adrenal glands. Their experiments helped show the extraordinary effects of adrenal extracts on the circulation, work which the Royal College of Physicians describes as helping to pave the way for the discovery of adrenaline. George Oliver died in 1915, having travelled a very long way from the Middleton medical family into which he had been born.

Middleton becomes a busy nineteenth-century village

By the middle of the nineteenth century Middleton had grown into much more than a settlement serving nearby mines. A directory published in 1856 records a weekly Saturday market, two annual fairs and five schools in the village. There were inns, tradespeople, shops and services, all serving not only people living in Middleton but families spread across the farms, hamlets and mining communities of Upper Teesdale. Farming remained just as important to village life as the industrial story growing around it, and Middleton had become the place where much of the upper dale came to shop, trade, learn and meet.

Religion was another visible part of the changing village. The London Lead Company itself had strong Quaker connections, while Middleton developed a particularly active Nonconformist tradition during the nineteenth century. A Baptist chapel was established at Hude in the 1820s, Wesleyan Methodism became firmly established and the surviving Primitive Methodist chapel at Town End dates from 1872. Its size, with galleries around three sides, gives some idea of how important these congregations had become as Middleton’s population grew.

St Mary’s and the church Middleton lost

Middleton’s parish church was changing at almost exactly the same time. The present St Mary’s was built during 1878–79 on the site of the much older church that had served the village for centuries. When the old building was pulled down in the spring of 1878, parts of it were deliberately saved. Medieval stonework was reused in the new church, while a late thirteenth-century window survived separately and still stands in the churchyard today. The detached bellhouse survived as well, leaving several pieces of the older Middleton sitting alongside the Victorian church.

The rebuilding was a big event for the village. Middleton residents raised money towards the new church, major donors contributed hundreds and thousands of pounds, and when St Mary’s opened on 23 October 1879 the newspaper estimated that more than 500 people packed into the building. There is a much more personal side to the story too. Middleton lead-miner poet Richard Watson had sat beside the old church shortly before its demolition and written a farewell to the place where he had been baptised and where his parents had married. Our full St Mary’s Church, Middleton-in-Teesdale history follows the old church, its demolition, the surviving medieval window, the bellhouse and the people tied to the site in much more detail. 

The Bainbridge Memorial Fountain appeared around the same period. Erected around 1877, the ornate cast-iron fountain commemorates Robert Walton Bainbridge of Middleton House, who was closely connected with the London Lead Company, and a testimonial presented to him and his wife by company employees and friends. A retirement date sometimes repeated online does not fit the surviving evidence, so we have deliberately left it out. What is clear is the connection between Bainbridge, the Lead Company and the fountain, which helps explain why such an elaborate memorial stands in the Horse Market today.

The railway comes to Middleton

By the 1860s Middleton had grown into an important centre for Upper Teesdale, but getting people and goods in and out of the dale was still slow. Barnard Castle had been connected to the railway network in 1856, and people in Middleton soon wanted the same advantage. During the 1865 General Election, local supporters approached railway promoter Henry Pease for help. He persuaded the North Eastern Railway to support a new Tees Valley Railway Company, with the larger railway subscribing half of its £25,000 capital. Thomas Witham of Lartington Hall became chairman and one of its major supporters, and Parliament authorised the line on 19 June 1865. 

Building a railway further up Teesdale was not easy. The route had to cross both the Balder and the Lune on substantial stone viaducts, and bad winter weather slowed the work through 1866 and 1867. A test train finally travelled over the completed route in February 1868. On 12 May, an inaugural train and inspection ran from Barnard Castle into the dale, with the public passenger service beginning the following day, 13 May 1868. The contemporary account of that first journey gives us one of the nicest glimpses of Victorian Middleton we have found. When the railway party arrived at the terminus, two bands were waiting for them. They led the visitors across into the village, where a triumphal arch decorated with evergreens had been erected carrying the words “Success to Enterprise.” Afterwards, tea was served in the London Lead Company schoolroom. 

The station itself had one little geographical quirk. Middleton stood on the County Durham side of the River Tees, but the railway terminus was built on the opposite bank, then in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Anyone arriving by train therefore still had to cross the river to reach the village. Keeping the station on the south side also avoided building another expensive railway bridge over the Tees. The early station was fairly simple, with a single platform, a turntable and later an engine shed, but it grew with the railway. Durham archive plans survive for a substantial “New Station – Middleton in Teesdale” scheme drawn up for the North Eastern Railway in 1888, including the station building, stationmaster’s house, doors, windows and drainage. 

For Middleton, the railway was about far more than passengers. Stone became one of its most important loads, with quarry workings around Middleton connected into the railway system. By 1904, the station was officially equipped to deal with ordinary goods as well as cattle, horse boxes, parcels and furniture vans, while separate goods connections served the Co-operative Society, a sawmill and quarry businesses. Barytes and other minerals also travelled out by rail, and in 1911 almost 2,000 tonnes of barytes were sent from Middleton station. So although the line had been promoted partly with the mineral wealth of Upper Teesdale in mind, it ended up serving a much broader economy of stone, farming, shops and local industry. 

The railway changed who could reach Middleton too. Even on the opening journey, the press was already pointing out that the new line would make High Force much easier for visitors to reach, with the waterfall only a few miles beyond the terminus. By the 1880s cyclists were arriving by train with their bicycles, and the North Eastern Railway promoted tickets that allowed people to travel to one station and walk or cycle onwards through the dale. By the 1890s it was even possible to leave London during the afternoon and reach Middleton in time for dinner that evening. A place that had once taken serious effort to reach had suddenly become part of a much wider world. 

The railway therefore did much more than give Middleton a station. It gave farms and businesses new markets, made it easier to move livestock and stone, brought visitors deeper into Upper Teesdale and tied the village far more closely to Barnard Castle, Darlington and the national railway network. For nearly a century the sound of trains became part of everyday Middleton life, until road transport and the railway cuts of the twentieth century brought that chapter to an end.

Lead declines, but Middleton keeps working

The great lead-mining period could not continue indefinitely. By the later nineteenth century British producers were facing falling prices and increasing competition from imported lead, while many of the easier or richer parts of local veins had already been worked. The London Lead Company began reducing its operations and agreed to dissolve in 1902. Its mines and other interests were then disposed of, and by 1905 the company had left Teesdale. After nearly a century in which its presence had influenced everything from housing to education, this was a major turning point for Middleton.

Industry did not simply disappear when lead declined. Mining continued at some sites, old workings were revisited and other minerals became important at different times. Fluorspar and barytes formed part of the wider mineral economy, while whinstone quarrying became particularly significant around Middleton and Upper Teesdale. The hard dolerite of the Whin Sill made excellent roadstone and aggregate, and quarries around Middleton, Holwick and elsewhere supplied large quantities of stone. A photograph in the Durham archive records one dramatic moment in this later industrial history, when Ord & Maddison’s Park and Whinstone Crushing Mills burned down in 1915.

Agriculture remained just as important through these changes. Middleton continued to serve farms spread over a wide upland area, and Middleton-in-Teesdale Farmers’ Mart Limited was incorporated on 14 May 1924. That date matters because it shows how the village continued adapting after the great lead-company period. Mining had helped transform Middleton during the nineteenth century, but farming never vanished beneath the industrial story. Sheep, cattle, agricultural trade and the needs of surrounding farms remained part of everyday life. 

One of the best places to understand the older industry is Coldberry Lead Mine, around three kilometres north-north-west of Middleton. Historic England describes its early history as uncertain, which is another reason to be careful about repeating claims about Roman or extremely early mining. What survives is still extraordinary: mine levels, dressing floors, water-management systems, the remains of a water-balance incline and the huge feature known as Coldberry Gutter. The mine was worked again during the twentieth century, with an ore shoot operating from the late 1930s until 1953. Our Coldberry Lead Mine guide explores the site itself, while our Life in the Teesdale Lead Mines page looks more closely at how the wider mining landscape worked.

From gaslight to electric light

For generations, lighting Middleton after dark depended on gas made in the village itself. The Middleton-in-Teesdale Gas Company was formed in 1860, with its works at Gas Lane near Town End. Coal gas was produced there and fed through the village for lighting, leaving behind a street name that still makes much more sense once you know what stood there. The gasworks appears to have remained in use until around 1938, by which point a completely different source of power had arrived in the dale.

Electricity reached Middleton during the first half of the twentieth century, although we have not yet found the exact switch-on date. What we can say safely is that by the mid-1930s the village was part of the North-Eastern Electric Supply Company network, with a contemporary survey describing the rural Tees valley as well supplied with electricity as far west as Middleton-in-Teesdale. The same survey makes an interesting point about the quarries scattered across the region. Whinstone, limestone and sandstone workings needed large amounts of power, and that industrial demand helped push electricity lines into rural areas that might otherwise have taken much longer to reach. 

The change was not instant. Gas and electricity overlapped for a time, and some of the more isolated parts of Upper Teesdale had to wait much longer for convenient supplies. One later recollection describes people from further up the dale carrying heavy wireless accumulators about ten miles into Middleton to have them recharged. Early radios could not simply be plugged into a socket, and those batteries had to make the journey backwards and forwards whenever they ran down. It is a tiny detail, but it gives a much better idea of what new technology actually meant for families living in the upper dale. 

By 1953, things had moved on dramatically. An advert in Practical Television offered a radio, television and electrical business at 3 Horse Market, Middleton-in-Teesdale for sale. In the space of a few decades, Middleton had gone from making its own gas at Town End to having a shop dealing in televisions and electrical equipment in the middle of the village.

The railway closes and the village changes again

By the middle of the twentieth century road transport had changed the way people travelled and the way goods were moved around Teesdale. The railway that had seemed so important when it opened in 1868 was gradually losing its role. Closure was proposed during the early 1960s and met local objections, but permission was eventually granted. The final passenger trains ran on Saturday 28 November 1964, with the formal closure to passengers taking effect on 30 November. Freight survived for only a few more months before ending on 5 April 1965, and by May 1967 the track had been lifted. 

Losing the railway was a significant change, but Middleton continued to do what it had been doing for centuries: adapt. Shops and services changed, private cars and buses replaced the railway for most journeys, older industrial buildings found new uses and tourism became increasingly important to the local economy. Farming remained part of village life, while the landscape around Middleton drew walkers, naturalists and visitors interested in High Force, Upper Teesdale and the North Pennines.

What is nice is that the railway has not completely disappeared. Parts of its former course survive as the Tees Railway Path, so a route once built to move passengers, livestock, stone and industrial goods has become somewhere people now walk and cycle. It is another good example of how Middleton’s history has been reused rather than completely erased.

Middleton’s history is still built into the village

Middleton-in-Teesdale was designated a conservation area in 1973, and the decision makes sense as soon as you begin looking at the village as a whole. Individual listed buildings matter, but the real strength is the way different periods survive together. There are early houses around the older village, the medieval church remains and belfry, the early nineteenth-century bridge, the London Lead Company buildings around Hude and Newtown, Victorian chapels, the Bainbridge Fountain and later reminders of the railway, quarrying and agricultural life.

For us, that is the best way to understand Middleton. It was never simply a “lead mining village”. There was a settlement beside the Tees centuries before the London Lead Company arrived, with a medieval church, farms and a landscape already shaped by ownership, hunting and agriculture. Lead mining then changed the scale of the place dramatically, bringing houses, schools, offices, workshops and new people. The railway connected it to a much wider world. Quarrying, farming and visitors helped carry the village through the decline of lead and into the twentieth century.

Once you know that story, the buildings stop feeling like separate old features. Middleton House belongs to the mines above Hudeshope. Masterman Place belongs to the families who worked within that mining economy. The bridge and railway belong to the need to move people and goods through the dale. The chapels and schools belong to a growing nineteenth-century community, while the mart belongs to an agricultural story that never really went away.

That is why Middleton is such an interesting place to explore slowly. You can stand in the Horse Market, walk through Newtown, look up towards Hude or cross the Tees and see different periods of the village’s history within a relatively small area. The lead mines may now be quiet and the trains have gone, but the shape of modern Middleton-in-Teesdale still owes a huge amount to the people who farmed, mined, built, traded, worshipped, travelled and made their lives here.

Explore more of Middleton-in-Teesdale

Middleton-in-Teesdale in 1870
Step back into Middleton in 1870 and discover the people, shops, pubs, schools, churches and everyday stories of village life.

Who Were the London Lead Company?
Discover the company that transformed Middleton, from its beginnings in seventeenth-century Britain to its departure from Teesdale in the early 1900s.

Middleton House
Explore the history of the former London Lead Company headquarters and the people who lived and worked there.

St Mary’s Church, Middleton-in-Teesdale
Discover the medieval church that stood here before 1878, the building that replaced it and the remarkable features that survived.

The Teesdale Hotel
Follow the story of the old Cross Keys, its transformation into the Cleveland Arms in 1888 and the hotel we know today.

Explore Middleton-in-Teesdale
Find practical information about the village, together with walks, waterfalls, shops, places to eat and more local history.